1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of uploading, analyzing, searching, retrieval and display of information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wouldn""t it be useful to be able to log onto an extranet or intranet system and be able to upload and search for key corporate marketing or advertising information, such as xe2x80x9cPlease find me the latest version of the new advertising campaign elements for print, broadcast and web mediaxe2x80x9d, or xe2x80x9cPlease locate the work in progress marketing presentation associated with our upcoming product line ?xe2x80x9d, and show me a preview of portions of the presentation to make sure I am accessing the right version with the colored graphicxe2x80x9d. A company may want to implement this uploading and searching capability on its intranet or extranet or on the World Wide Web (WWW, or simply xe2x80x9cthe webxe2x80x9d).
Unfortunately, text based search algorithms cannot answer such queries. Yet, text based search tools are the predominate search tools available on the Internet today. Even if text based search algorithms are enhanced to examine files for file type and, therefore, be able to detect whether a file is a audio, video or other multimedia file, little if any information is available about the content of the file beyond its file type.
Further still, what if the search returns a number of files. Which one is right? Can the user tell from looking at the title of the document or some brief text contained in the document as is done by many present day search engines? In the case of relatively small text files, downloading one or two or three xe2x80x9cwrongxe2x80x9d files, when searching for the right file, is not a major problem. However, when downloading relatively large multimedia files, it may be problematic to download the files without having a degree of assurance that the correct file has been found.
It is desirable to provide an uploading and search engine that is capable of uploading media content and searching an extranet, intranet or the Internet, or other large distributed networks for multimedia information. It is also desirable that the uploading and search engine provides for analysis of the content of files found in the search and for display of previews of the information.